An international research team organized by the University of Colorado achieved the first multiple, unmanned aircraft interception of a telltale rush of cold air preceding a thunderstorm -- known as a "gust front" -- as it rolled across the Pawnee National Grassland in northeast Colorado last week.

"We believe this was the first time multiple unmanned aircraft systems were flown simultaneously to make coordinated measurements of the outflow from an evolving thunderstorm," CU postdoctoral fellow Jack Elston said of the Aug. 14 effort, in a news release

A gust front is a boundary separating a cold thunderstorm downdraft from warm, humid surface air, which interests scientists because it has the capacity to generate damaging wind speeds as high as 100 mph.

As the gust front approached from the west at Pawnee National Grassland, three UAS teams spread out about a quarter of a mile from each other along Weld County Road 69 near Briggsdale and launched three small, unmanned aircraft, including a Datahawk and two Skywalkers, all with wingspans of less than 5 feet.

Elston is the principal investigator and organizer of the National Science Foundation-sponsored Multi-sUAS Evaluation of Techniques for Measurement of Atmospheric Properties field experiment, called MET-MAP. RECUV is a university, government and industry partnership headquartered in CU's aerospace engineering sciences department.

According to RECUV Director Eric Frew, a professor in aerospace engineering, MET-MAP was organized to coincide with the August deployment of a U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research project known as EA-DDDAS.

"The focus of EA-DDDAS is to develop a smart, small unmanned aircraft system that can plan its own flight path to maximize endurance by combining real-time weather-radar and atmospheric-model data with measurements made from the aircraft," Frew, a professor in aerospace engineering, said in a news release.

The gust interception also involved Colorado State University, Boulder's Center for Severe Weather Research, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Texas Tech University, the University of Tübingen in Germany.

An international team of scientists and students led by CU-Boulder used multiple unmanned aircraft to simultaneously intercept the outflow of a thunderstorm at Colorado s Pawnee National Grasslands on Aug. 14. (Photo courtesy Jack Elston / University of Colorado)

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